You know the name, but just who were the Luddites?

Do you declare yourself a "Luddite" every time some new app or wireless device …

"You heroes of England who wish to have a trade Be true to each other and be not afraid Tho' Bayonet is fixed they can do no good As long as we keep up the Rules of General Ludd."

Not long ago I met a filmmaker friend for lunch in the Fisherman's Wharf area of San Francisco, where she was doing some work. She showed up in her sports car with her digital video gear and spent much of our meeting setting it up. At some point she got a call and took it on her BlackBerry. Toward the end of our conversation, I mentioned a new piece of software I had downloaded.

"I don't get that stuff," she nervously confided. "I'm such a Luddite."

One of the ironies of our time is that while most Americans have more machines and gadgets than ever, the term "Luddite" has become part of our lingua franca. An online critic calls a new play skeptical of cell phone culture a "luddites' manifesto." A writer for the New York Times boasts of his "luddite summer," in which he "tried not to Twitter." A graduate student wonders whether it is still "OK to be a luddite," as did the writer Thomas Pynchon almost a quarter of a century ago.

"We now live, we are told, in the Computer Age," Pynchon worried. "What is the outlook for Luddite sensibility? Will mainframes attract the same hostile attention as knitting frames once did?"

What's strange about this kind of talk is how divorced it is from the concerns of the poor unfortunates of two hundred years ago who actually were "The Luddites." We've got them down as a noble mob of anti-technology and anti-capitalist crusaders. But were they either of those things?

Only General Ludd . . .

The Luddites were weavers who had the bad luck to live in early nineteenth century Britain, most famously in the Nottinghamshire county of Robin Hood legend. They made leg stockings, first as apprentices and then hopefully as masters. They worked in villages and sold their wares to hosiery distributors who, in turn, sold them locally or shipped them off to markets across the British Isles, continental Europe, and the rest of the world.

Then a series of economic calamities shook their world. During the Napoleonic wars and its conflict with the United States in 1812, Britain lost access to continental European and American consumer markets. To add insult to economic injury, the clothing stylist Beau Brummell encouraged the London upper classes to wear trousers rather than stockings.

This reduced many parts of artisan England to near starvation; in response, weaver masters made the same blunder that farmers of the time often made. They overproduced, skimped on quality, and embraced labor-saving machines—which in turn cut the wages of thousands of stocking makers and put more of them out of work.

The weavers appealed for help and emergency relief, but the war with France painted any public outcry with the color of sedition. The workers could not vote, legally join unions, or in some cases even demonstrate in public. There was, however, one ancient means of registering discontent that artisans resorted to in desperate times: breaking or "Ludding" machines. Popular legend had it that one day a young slacker named Ned Ludd got sick of his job and stopped working. His boss managed to convince a judge that Ned should be whipped. The kid wasn't the sharpest pencil in the cup, and he smashed up his weaving machine in response.

Desperate, and inspired by this tale of Ned Ludd, between 1811 and 1817 thousands of stocking makers in five counties raised hell, destroying weaving frames, factories, and workshops. When they weren't trashing machinery, they robbed storehouses and rioted over food prices and supplies. All told, the Luddites destroyed property and machinery worth about �100,000. By the height of the rebellion, "Ned Ludd" had been promoted to mythical leader of the Luddites.

"Only General Ludd means the poor any good," his followers scrawled on the walls of public houses and taverns.

Full fashioned work

So what did the Luddites really believe in? The popular image of them as an anti-technology movement fumbles upon a close look at their lives. The stocking frame weaving machines that these artisans mastered were complicated devices that required hand and foot coordination. So were the shearing tools they used to cut their cloth.

Obviously, the Luddites whacked an impressive number of new labor-saving devices—"wide" weaving frames that could do the work of five stocking makers, and even bigger steam-powered factories that could replace entire artisan communities. But they just as often went after workshops with conventional machinery. The Luddites didn't oppose technology; they opposed the sudden collapse of their industry, which they blamed in part on new weaving machines, but just as often on cost-cutting workshops that still operated with more conventional equipment.

You also can't tag the Luddites simply as an anti-capitalism movement (although plenty of writers do). Their anonymously published poems and statements didn't cite the c-word—but, obviously, they made stockings for sale in the marketplace. What these artisans fought was a completely unregulated economy that regarded their destruction as a minor blot on the larger page of progress.

"Let the wise and the great lend their aid and advice," one of their songs exclaimed. "Nor e'er their assistance withdraw / Till full-fashioned work at the old fashioned price / Is established by Custom and Law."

With the end of the European war, improved trade, lower food prices, and some short term employer concessions slowed the Luddites down. So did massive repression. Luddism, the British historian E.P. Thompson wrote in 1966, was "a violent eruption of feeling against unrestrained industrial capitalism," and the powerful responded without restraint as well.

Give the Luddites some credit for effective organizing, at the least; it took the biggest army the British government had ever assembled in response to a domestic uprising to stop General Ludd and his followers: 12,000 armed men—more than some of the divisions sent to maintain control over India.

Are we all Luddites now?

So can modern mobile warriors consider themselves descendants of this cause? If you are reading this essay on your laptop or iPhone, chances are that you aren't an unemployed weaver staring starvation in the face. You may be intimidated or annoyed by Twitter, Facebook, or the latest mobile phone application, but that doesn't make you a Luddite. The stocking artisans of early nineteenth century England had nothing in common with our daily anxieties about devices unimaginable in their time.

On the other hand, many people today still fear a world in which technology and the free market both run rampant without any oversight from "the wise and the great" (or from the rest of us, for that matter). To that extent, we can claim at least a strain of Luddite ancestry.

But only a strain. Let's be grateful that we live in a more open society where we can debate labor and technology problems via peaceful and democratic means, and remember General Ludd's Army as the product of a time when others couldn't do the same.

"Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood, His feats I but little admire. I will sing the Achievements of General Ludd, Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire."

Matthew Lasar / Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.